In pursuit of running water.

On a recent Monday, I took myself off the woods.

It’s the time of year where change is hitting: the thaw is lessening, the animals are moving around more, the sun has warmth to it. The frozen forest is melting, giving away to rushing water and the smell of dirt. And I wanted to immerse myself in it.

There’s something to said about the psychological effect of movement on the brain after sitting so long in stillness. The wind was up, a spring storm blowing in—winter hasn’t quite let us out of its clutches yet—and everywhere, all around me, was water. Rushing down the mountain through long-standing swollen creeks; trickling down every slope in temporary rivulets; dripping from rock faces and moss; lapping at the edge of the lakeshore. The wind whipped freshly-exposed leaves from last year’s fall up into the air, so that I kept thinking birds were taking flight in the corner of my eye. It was the antithesis of stillness. It was a commotion of movement.

And I felt right at home.

Last week, I was laid off from my tech job. It’s pretty much a given that if you’re in tech for awhile, you’re going to get laid off at some point. After nearly 10 years in the industry, my time was up. It’s the first time in my adult life that I’ve been unemployed while not, like, actively going through cancer treatment—and my brain doesn’t quite know what to do with the time I now have on my hands.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. There’s so much my brain wants to do with the time now on my hands that it can’t settle, can’t find the first steps. And that’s okay—as I write this, it’s been less than a week since it happened. But I knew that in this particularly uncertain time of my life, this time filled with movement and change and big scary decisions, the most centring thing I could do was throw myself into the forest. And so I did, and found the forest mirroring myself back to me in all its chaos. That recognition was calming. It’s just the season, after all.